Please refer to the attached file.
A 6+ magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan on 31 August 2025, followed by multiple aftershocks in the days that followed. The earthquake primarily affected Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, causing fatalities, injuries, widespread damage to homes and public infrastructure, displacement and major disruption in remote mountainous areas.
The humanitarian response was implemented in an extremely constrained physical access environment characterized by landslides, damaged roads, difficult terrain, recurring aftershocks, weak telecommunications including a 48-hour nationwide outage, winter onset, and restrictions affecting Afghan women staff access to UN compounds. Despite these conditions, humanitarian actors mounted a large-scale emergency response that delivered life-saving assistance rapidly and at significant scale. Rapid donor funding, including an emergency Central Emergency Relief Fund (CERF) allocation complemented by a reserve allocation by the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund (AHF), together with early resource mobilization efforts, notably the EU Humanitarian Air Bridge (EUHAB), which operated five humanitarian cargo shipments between 19 and 29 September 2025, were widely viewed by responders as critical enablers of the response. A detailed infographic timeline of the response is included in the annex.
Following the conclusion of the response, the Inter-Cluster Coordination Team (ICCT) initiated an After-Action Review (AAR) to assess the humanitarian response to the 31 August 2025 eastern region earthquake across Nangarhar and Kunar provinces. The review examined operational coordination, response delivery, information management, logistics, access and accountability arrangements through document review, operational data analysis, key informant interviews, focus group discussions and field consultations with humanitarian actors, de facto authorities (DfA) and affected communities, including dedicated consultations with Afghan women responders and women from affected communities. Conducted between January and March 2026, including a field mission to Jalalabad and affected districts in February, this report presents the main findings, lessons learned and recommendations emerging from the AAR.
By January, more than 300,000 people had received assistance, including over 230,000 people in priority districts including Chawkay, Khas Kunar and Nurgal in Kunar Province and Dara-e-Nur in Nangarhar. Stakeholders consistently described the eastern region earthquake response as an improvement over the 2023 Herat earthquake response, characterizing it as faster, more organized, and better coordinated in delivering immediate assistance. Some lessons from previous emergency responses appeared to have been internalized and translated into stronger operational readiness.
However, the review also identified persistent structural gaps. The most significant early constraint was not a lack of humanitarian capacity, but the limited operational readiness of first 72-hour activation and sequencing arrangements needed to turn preparedness plans into immediate field action. While contingency planning had intended to frontload key operational decisions, some elements were re-discussed and partially re-developed during the initial response phase, contributing to avoidable delays. Several stakeholders also noted that early planning figures generated through the Disaster Impact Model (DIM) were constrained by outdated shelter typology data and inaccuracies in modelled earthquake intensity data, limiting confidence in projected damage estimates during the initial phase of the response.
A second and equally important finding is that while the humanitarian system proved increasingly capable of scaling relief assistance, the transition toward recovery and resilience support once acute needs began to stabilize was slow with various degrees of uptake from Basic Human Needs (BHN) actors. Across interviews, focus groups, field teams and coordination actors, respondents repeatedly emphasized the need for earlier pivoting toward:
- emergency shelter repair and reconstruction
- debris clearance and road repairs
- restoration of water systems
- livelihoods recovery
- winter resilience
The draft Final Evaluation of the Herat Post-Earthquake Recovery Response Project Under the Special Trust Fund for Afghanistan reinforces that earthquake response effectiveness should not be assessed solely through the speed and scale of immediate relief delivery, but also on how early, and at what scale, recovery, resilience and longer-term service restoration activities are operationalized within the response.
According to the evaluation, in Herat, the integrated multi-agency Joint Programme implemented by participating UN agencies supported shelter recovery, infrastructure rehabilitation, livelihoods assistance and community action planning, contributing to high satisfaction of people served, improved perceptions of safety and stronger recovery outcomes among assisted households compared with control groups. At the same time, the evaluation highlights continuing challenges related to long-term sustainability, including financing gaps, market access constraints and the difficulty of sustaining recovery gains without continued support.
These findings reinforce the importance of strengthening the transition between emergency response, early recovery and longer-term resilience support. While the system increasingly understands the requirements for emergency response and recovery-oriented programming, experiences from both the Herat and the eastern region earthquake responses suggest that further work is needed to ensure financing arrangements, implementation modalities and coordination mechanisms can support timelier and more predictable scaled recovery transitions.
During AAR field visits, the team observed a range of BHN interventions across affected communities. However, community members, local DfA and humanitarian staff consistently indicated that ongoing support remained insufficient relative to the scale of recovery and reconstruction needs, particularly highlighting the importance of livelihoods support and income-generating opportunities to support longer-term self-reliance.
This review concludes that Afghanistan’s disaster response capacity has measurably strengthened since the 2023 Herat earthquake response. Future improvements will depend not only on rapid emergency scale-up, but also on more executable preparedness systems, stronger anticipatory planning assumptions, and faster scaled transition from relief to recovery, the latter constituting a shared responsibility among humanitarian and BHN partners.